By Bjorn Lomborg
Discussions about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out “impure” thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy. In March, Al Gore’s science adviser and prominent climate researcher, Jim Hansen, proclaimed that when it comes to dealing with global warming, the “democratic process isn’t working.” Although science has demonstrated that carbon-dioxide from fossil fuels is heating the planet, politicians are unwilling to follow his advice and stop building coal-fired power plants.
Hansen argues that, “the first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections, but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.” Although he doesn’t tell us what the second or third action is, he has turned up in a British court to defend six activists who damaged a coal power station. He argues that we need “more people chaining themselves to coal plants,” a point repeated by Gore.
The Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman goes further. After the narrow passage of the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill in the US House of Representatives, Krugman said there was no justification for a vote against it. He called virtually all of the members who voted against it, “climate deniers” who were committing “treason against the planet.”
Krugman said that the “irresponsibility and immorality” of the representatives’ democratic viewpoints were “unforgivable” and a “betrayal.” He thus accused almost half of the democratically elected members of the House, from both parties, of treason for holding the views that they do - thereby essentially negating democracy.
Less well-known pundits make similar points, suggesting that people with “incorrect” views on global warming should face Nuremburg-style trials or be tried for crimes against humanity. There is clearly a trend. The climate threat is so great - and democracies are doing so little about it - that people conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem, and that perhaps people ought not to be allowed to express heterodox opinions on such an important topic.
This is scary, although not without historical precedent. Much of the American McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s was driven by the same burning faith in the righteousness of the mission - a faith that saw fundamental rights abrogated. Wewould be well served to go down a different path. Read more here.
By Dr. Richard Courtney
My comments in a web debate after Booker’s article on the Daily Telegraph’s web site responding to a reasonable question from another commenter named Vaughn.
You ask me: “You quote: ‘...the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.’ Do you take this to mean that there is no global warming?”
Let me be clear. I say
1. It is obvious that there is no global warming while the globe is cooling.
2. The globe has cooled over the last decade.
Slioch’s (a cooling denialist commenter) linear trends and 5-year averages do not change these simple and obvious truths.
It is an empirical fact that the Earth has now been experiencing global cooling for such a long time that the cooling is even admitted by RealClimate. And, as I state above, to admit the existence of global cooling is to deny the existence of global warming.
But they say at RealClimate: Excerpt: “We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Nino. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.” So, even RealClimate (i.e. the Alamo of discredited so-called climate scientists) now admits the fact that the Earth is experiencing global cooling - at very least, RealClimate admits that global warming has stopped - and suggests that global warming will not resume “until roughly 2020.” And they are trying to provide excuses for the cooling.
In other words, these global warming propagandists have recognized that their climate change denial of the last decade is not sustainable anymore. So, they have abandoned any pretence that global warming exists at the moment, and they are presenting their excuses for why the globe is cooling together with their assertions of when global warming will resume (presumably they will claim with a vengeance).
This raises three issues (two scientific and one political). Firstly, the claimed “overshoot” being responsible for the present lack of global warming is denied by the data. The easiest way to see this is to view Monckton’s Figure showing recent global temperature as a composite index of global mean surface temperature anomalies, taking the mean of two surface and two satellite datasets posted here.
The graph is a composite but each of the averaged data sets shows the same (as anybody can check for themselves).
See larger image here of Hadley CRUT3v monthly and the UAH MSU lower tropospheric vs the NOAA ESRL Mauna Loa CO2
It is apparent that the data shows the global temperature did “overshoot” the pre-1998 trend but had returned to the trend by 2001. The global temperature has fallen since. Hence, there is no “process of radiatively dissipating” and if there were such a “process” then it had ended by 2001. Secondly, there is no reason to suppose that warming will resume in “roughly 2020”. However, as I have repeatedly explained, it may - or may not - resume around 2030.
Anybody who looks at the records of recent global temperature (i.e. the most recent millennia) can see a series of cycles that are overlaid on each other. For example: There seems to be an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP). And there seems to be an apparent ~60 year oscillation that caused cooling to ~1910, then warming to ~1940, then cooling to ~1970, then warming to ~2000, then cooling since.
So, has the warming from the LIA stopped or not? That cannot be known because the pattern of past global temperature fluctuations suggest that the existing cooling phase of the ~60 year cycle is opposing any such warming. And that cooling phase can be anticipated to end around 2030 when it can be anticipated that then either (a) warming from the LIA will continue until we reach temperatures similar to those of the MWP or (b) cooling will set in until we reach temperatures similar to those of the LIA.
This brings us to the political point that derives from the above scientific facts. It is a scientific conclusion that the above data does not indicate whether future warming or cooling will occur. And it is a political decision to ignore that unarguable scientific conclusion. But deniers of natural climate change do ignore it and they proclaim that human activities alone cause global warming: their climate change denial is pure superstition.
Importantly, there is no clear evidence in the data for the existence of anthropogenic (that is, man-made) global warming (AGW) induced by increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations or anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. The emissions and the concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased (the atmospheric concentration has increased by ~5%) over the last decade while the global temperature has fallen. Indeed, the Southern Hemisphere started to cool about 20 years ago and this cooling spread to include the Northern Hemisphere about 10 years ago.
However, advocates of AGW use the Precautionary Principle saying we should stop greenhouse gas emissions - notably carbon dioxide emissions - in case the AGW hypothesis is right. But that turns the Principle on its head. Stopping the emissions would reduce fossil fuel usage with resulting economic damage. This would be worse than the - oil crisis - of the 1970s because the reduction would be greater (the European Union suggests 80% reduction!), would be permanent, and energy use has increased since then. The economic disruption would be world-wide. Major effects would be in the developed world because it has the largest economies. Worst effects would be on the world’s poorest peoples: people near starvation are starved by it.
A Commentary by Debra J. Saunders
No wonder skeptics consider the left’s belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion—last week in Italy, G8 leaders pledged to not allow the Earth’s temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. For its next act, the G8 can part the Red Sea. The worst part is: These are the brainy swells who think of themselves as—all bow—Men of Science.
The funny part is: G8 leaders can’t even decide the year from which emissions must be reduced. 1990? 2005? “This question is a mystery for everyone,” an aide to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said. And while President Obama led the charge for the G8 nations to agree to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in industrial nations by 2050, the same Russian aide dissed the standard as “likely unattainable.”
No worries, the language was non-binding. Global-warming believers say that they are all about science, but their emphasis is not on results so much as declarations of belief. Faith. Mystery. Promises to engage in pious acts. Global warming is a religion. While Obama was in Italy preaching big cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, he was losing some of his flock in Washington. The House may have passed the 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill largely unread, but Senate Democrats are combing the fine print and not liking what they see. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said of the bill, “We need to be a leader in the world but we don’t want to be a sucker.”
Republicans who oppose the legislation are positively gleeful. For some issues, it can be more fun being part of the opposition, as Democrats are discovering. During the last administration, Senate Dems could slam President George W. Bush for not supporting the 1997 Kyoto global-warming treaty, secure in the knowledge that they would never have to vote yea or nay on a treaty that they knew could be poison for the coal industry and family checkbooks. That’s why the Senate in 1997 voted 95-0 against any global-warming treaty that exempted developing nations like China. Now China wants none of the G8’s goal for it to halve its greenhouse gases—and the Dems are stuck with a leader who wants to save the planet.
When the GOP was in the White House, Democrats got to play scientific martyrs. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, would go running to the New York Times or Washington Post with the lament that the Bushies were trying to muzzle his pro-global-warming science. No matter how many times he appeared on TV, the stories kept reporting on allegations that Bush was censoring science.
Now GOP senators have their own Hansen: Alan Carlin of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Be it noted, Carlin is not a scientist. He’s an MIT-trained economist, albeit with a degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology, who has worked as an analyst at the EPA since 1974. In March, he co-wrote a 98-page paper that began, “We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming.” He fears politics are steering what should be scientific research. The analysis noted that global temperatures have declined over the last 11 years while carbon emissions have increased. It cited a 2009 paper that found “solar variability” may have had more to do with any warming over the last few decades than rising greenhouse gas levels. Carlin also wondered why the EPA bought into global-warming doom scenarios, when, despite increased greenhouse gas levels, U.S. crop yields are up, air quality is improved and Americans are living longer.
Did the EPA welcome a dissenting voice? Au contraire. According to e-mails released last month by Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, Carlin’s supervisor told him not to “have any direct communication” with anyone in-house or elsewhere on the issue. And: “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.” Only later, Carlin told me, did the EPA grant him permission to post the paper on his personal website and talk to the media.
Kazman argues that the EPA’s failure to post Carlin’s paper officially violates court rulings that require agencies to disclose discarded evidence when making rules. And: “The bigger irony is that this administration has been touting its commitment to scientific integrity and agency transparency.” Now, you can argue that the Obama administration simply wanted to present a clear message on a policy on which it already had settled. But why is it muzzling science when Bush did it, but not worthy of a New York Times story when Obama does it?
Don’t say that Obama has science on his side. As the Carlin paper noted, “We do not believe that science is writing a description of the world or the opinions of world authorities on a particular subject ... The question in our view is not what someone believes, but how what he or she believes corresponds with real world data.” The global-warming community’s reaction to real-world data—and the lack of warming in this century—has been to remain true believers. Except now they call it “climate change.” See post on Rasmussen Reports here.
Not Evil Just Wrong Blog
A leading UK lawyer, who represented the parent that sued Al Gore in the British High Court, has laughed off claims by the former vice-president that the judge ruled in his favour.
Speaking from London John Day, a senior partner in Malletts Solicitors, said Mr Gore was misrepresenting what the judge had found. Mr Day represented a British parent who sued the UK Ministry of Education when they wanted to distribute and show Mr Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth to every British school child. In the 2006 documentary Mr Gore claimed humanity is in danger because of man made Global Warming. He also claimed flooding and disease would increase with the destruction of most of the world’s major cities including New York, London and Shanghai. As a result Mr Gore was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and the documentary won an Oscar.
However, after a lengthy hearing a High Court Judge, Mr Justice Burton, found that An Inconvenient Truth contained significant scientific errors in nine key areas. But questioned about the embarasing High Court decision during a current trip to Australia Mr Gore stated on ABC Australia “Well, the ruling was in my favour”.
However, this has been rejected by Mr Day who said Mr Gore’s latest claims are “difficult to square with the reality of the judgement”.
“The judge found there were nine serious scientific errors in the film.” He said the court ordered that the film was “not suitable to be shown in British schools without a health warning”. “Mr Justice Burton said an Inconvenient Truth wasn’t fit to be shown in British schools without suitably corrected guidance which drew attention to the errors in the film and its political partisanship.”
Among the errors listed by Mr Justice Burton were Mr Gore claims that rising sea levels would destroy cities in the near future, that the polar bear was endangered and that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting all because of Global Warming. The judge found these to be scientific errors. He also dismissed Mr Gore’s claims that Hurricane Katrina was caused by Global Warming. See more here.
Mail On Sunday, 12 July 2009
Peter Sissons, the veteran newsreader who announced his retirement last month, has launched a withering attack on the BBC - claiming standards have fallen and accusing producers of being too mired in political correctness to do anything about it.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday today, he says: ‘At today’s BBC, a complaint I often heard from senior producers was that they dared not reprimand their subordinates for basic journalistic mistakes - such as getting ages, dates, titles and even football scores wrong - it being politically incorrect to risk offending them.’
Mr Sissons, 66, who has worked for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, says there was ‘great attention’ to the text of news bulletins when he joined the Corporation 20 years ago, but that now appeared to be lacking.
In a wide-ranging attack, he also claims it is now ‘effectively BBC policy’ to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming. He says: ‘I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change.
‘The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that “the science is settled”, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t. ‘But it is effectively BBC policy… that those views should not be heard.’
Full story here.
Dr. Benny Peiser (CCnet) adds more tidbits in the news here:
The days when science was blighted by a press interested only in “scare stories” are over, according to the Science Minister. Most coverage of science by the media is now balanced, accurate and engaging, Lord Drayson said. --Zoe Corbyn, Times Higher Education, 9 July 2009
Almost 250 children under the age of five have died in a wave of intensely cold weather in Peru. Children die from pneumonia and other respiratory infections every year during the winter months particularly in Peru’s southern Andes. But this year freezing temperatures arrived almost three months earlier than usual.
Household energy bills will rise by more than 200 pounds under the Government’s low-carbon strategy being announced next week. Meeting Britain’s targets for cutting emissions could push another 1.7 million households into fuel poverty, meaning that seven million homes would be spending more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel. --The Times, 11 July 2009
By Ron House
It was only last August, when I was able to leave my paid job as a computer science lecturer, that I finally got around to asking myself what the truth was about global warming. True, the Kyoto protocol had come and gone (right past me); I had read lots of insults directed at our (Australia’s) ex-prime minister John Howard for saying there was no evidence of global warming, and for which he was supposedly a foolish neanderthal hopelessly out of touch with informed opinion. Well was he? I decided to spend some time finding out. I was glad I did, I nearly overlooked an issue that, handled wrongly, might result in billions of human and wildlife deaths.
It was maybe by the end of September that I was convinced John Howard was right and his critics wrong. Maybe a week later, I was convinced beyond that, that for sure there was no significant human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming (called AGW for short). That means, of course, that there would be no need for emissions trading schemes (cap and trade, ETS) to try to control carbon dioxide emissions. But when I mentioned my discoveries to some of my friends, almost all raised something called the “precautionary principle”, which goes like this: “True, maybe there is no AGW, but if that’s wrong, if the world is heating up due to human actions, a disaster will ensue; surely we should introduce ETS anyway, just to be safe; the animals will thank us.” I wondered about that.
Let’s forget the question of whether the IPCC is right or wrong about the world heating up and about whether humans are causing it. Let’s assume they’re right 100%. (They’re not, but this is about an even bigger question.) Let’s say they’re right. Now check the diagram below (enlarged here).
The reason the ice ages come as regular as clockwork is that they are driven by the changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, its axial inclination, and so on, things that change slowly over many thousands of years. Currently the ice ages are responding to all this on a 100,000-year cycle, and it is crystal clear that the next major movement on this cycle will be down, a sharp plunge into glacial conditions, followed by 100,000 years of a slowly deepening, ever-more deadly freeze.
So now we come to the precautionary principle. What’s the bigger danger? If the planet heats we might unfreeze some polar regions (cold regions heat more than hot regions) and make Siberia, northern Canada, and Greenland into green, verdant places where crops can grow and wild animals can prosper. Yes, we might also have to relocate some people if sea levels rise; we can’t pretend there is no downside at all from a warmer planet.
But if the planet cools, what then? Half the northern hemisphere landmass will be uninhabitable (and much of the southern hemisphere too). Climates will alternate viciously from year to year; no animal that is unable to migrate will be safe. The wealthy populations of Europe and North America, whose countries will be covered in ice, will obviously not simply sit down and die; they’ll migrate south and take the remaining warm places for themselves. Whatever the outcome, there will be wars, starvation, and unthinkable human and wildlife deaths. If we escape without half the world’s population dying, we’ll be very, very lucky indeed.
So here’s my vision of a wise precautionary principle: take advantage of any heating that human activity is making happen. If industrial activity is pumping up the planet’s temperature some degrees, excellent. The IPCC says we are making big changes, but climate realists, more credibly, say we are making only small changes. But big or small, any warming we can organise will forestall the next ice age. By lots (the alarmists) or only a little (climate realists), it all helps. Read more here.
By Dr. David Legates, PhD Exclusive to Cornwall Alliance
Just before the House of Representatives voted on a massive climate bill, the government released a report on climate change. It reiterated the Oscar-winning theme from An Inconvenient Truth - impacts from human-induced climate change are already occurring and that they are going to get worse. Much worse. But the report is so extreme that it would make Al Gore blush. The authors appear to have learned much from the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate - be extreme and loose with the facts. Oh, and that timing is everything, especially when it comes to congressional legislation.
The report is so extreme that I’m not sure where to start. Fortunately, Bradford Plumer, writing in the New Republic, has highlighted what he sees as its scariest scenarios. I’ll start there.
Plumer first notes that the report claims the mainland United States is likely to warm from 7F to 11.5F by 2090 - 1F per decade. The report states temperature rose more than 2F over the last 50 years but fails to mention that it fell more than 2F in the 25 years before that. So from 1934 to 2008 (75 years), the net effect has been no change in air temperature over the United States! Thus, the rise in CO2 over the past 75 years - a period accounting for most of the industrial emissions - has had no effect whatsoever on air temperature. The extreme figures cited by the report come from climate models, which always have strongly linked air temperature to rising CO2 and provide the basis for the ‘scary’ scenarios that Steve Schneider of Stanford University has argued scientists are pressured to offer up to get the public’s attention…and provide them with financial support.
Plumer’s eyebrows are raised again by a slide showing that by 2080, Washington DC will experience 90 to 100 days each year - more than three full months - with air temperatures above 90F. And places in the Deep South will experience more than half the year with temperatures above 90F! But these are the same models that for years have been criticized for producing physically impossible high maximum air temperatures. Why? Because they fail to take into account the fact that Washington DC, for example, is surrounded by water. In swampy environments, about nine times more energy is used to evaporate water than to raise air temperature. The only way these ridiculous scenarios are likely to play out is if the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and all their tributaries dry up. Not very likely!
The map shown by Plumer from the report is very telling. It compares the number of days per year in 1961-1979 for which the air temperature exceeded 90F with model prognostications for 2080-2099 from the worst case model scenario. Hmmm…why 1961-1979? The National Climatic Data Center - of which the lead author of the report, Thomas R. Karl, is the director - uses 1971-2000 for its climate ‘normal’ period. Why shorten the time period to 19 years and select earlier dates for the report? Could it be that the comparison is made much more striking given that 1961-1979 were the coolest 19 years of the last three-quarters of a century, when the media were all aghast with scares of global cooling?
Karl also told reporters that Chicago will see heat-wave deaths rising by a factor of ten by 2100. But don’t confuse him with the facts as many scientific articles have shown that cities which were adversely affected by heat wave mortality in the 1960s and 1970s have become less sensitive to extreme conditions because of improved medical care, increased access to air conditioning, and biophysical and infrastructural adaptations. Chalk one up for technology!
No respectable alarmist publication would be complete, however, without the requisite scare of sea-level rise. Historically, sea level has risen only about 7 inches over the past century and that rise has remained surprisingly constant. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, indicated that sea level rise by 2100 would be between 6 inches and, in their worst case scenario, 17 inches. But in keeping with the alarmist fantasy of this report, Plumer notes that sea levels are to rise 3 to 4 feet by century’s end. That’s an overstatement of the IPCC’s worst case scenario by at least a factor of two! How can this report ignore the ‘scientific consensus’ that is the IPCC? When you need to offer up scary scenarios, it seems acceptable to deviate from the IPCC ‘party line’, although I doubt anyone will criticize the authors of this report for it.
The full report offers up such a scary, extreme view of climate change that it could qualify for one of Al’s movies - The Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock, that is. But unlike this report and An Inconvenient Truth, at least Hitchcock’s movies were entertaining...and believable! Read story here.
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
According to Wikipedia, the Medieval Warm Period was a time of warm weather around AD 800-1300 during the European Medieval period. Initial research on the MWP and the following Little Ice Age (LIA) was largely done in Europe, where the phenomenon was most obvious and clearly documented. It was initially believed that the temperature changes were global. However, this view has been questioned; the 2001 IPCC report summarises this research, saying
“current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and ‘Medieval Warm Period’ appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries”.
Of course, there are many researchers, such as Michael Mann and his thoroughly discredited “hockey stick” that try mightily to make the MWP disappear.
News flash to IPCC. Now a scientist has linked the MWP to success of the Inca civilization in the southern hemisphere. It is not going away any time soon, it is spreading.
The new study is called “Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context” and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Link to paper (PDF) is here (h/t to WUWT reader Corey)
Here is the abstract: “The rapid expansion of the Inca from the Cuzco area of highland Peru produced the largest empire in the New World between ca. AD 1400-1532. Although this meteoric rise may in part be due to the adoption of innovative societal strategies, supported by a large labour force and standing army, we argue that this would not have been possible without increased crop productivity, which was linked to more favourable climatic conditions. A multi-proxy, high-resolution 1200-year lake sediment record was analysed at Marcacocha, 12 km north of Ollantaytambo, in the heartland of the Inca Empire. This record reveals a period of sustained aridity that began from AD 880, followed by increased warming from AD 1100 that lasted beyond the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1532. These increasingly warmer conditions allowed the Inca and their predecessors the opportunity to exploit higher altitudes from AD 1150, by constructing agricultural terraces that employed glacial-fed irrigation, in combination with deliberate agroforestry techniques. There may be some important lessons to be learnt today from these strategies for sustainable rural development in the Andes in the light of future climate uncertainty.”
Here is a news article about it that talks of the findings. (h/t to WUWT reader “cotwome") - Anthony.
Opportunity knocks, again, in the Andes
By Nicholas Asheshov, Living in Peru
The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire. A team of English and U.S. scientists has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that “the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries.” Read full post here.
Icecap Note: Take this excellent post together with the Idso’s CO2Science Medieval Warm Period project in which they identified data published by 715 individual scientists from 416 separate research institutions in 41 different countries ... and counting to support the global existence of the MWP! To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project’s database, click here.